Spurred by conversations a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about physicalism, the stance that everything is physical, that the physical facts fix all the facts. A long popular attack against this view has been to argue that it’s incoherent, since we can’t give a solid definition of what “physical” means. And so physicalism seems to be built on a foundation on shifting sands. This is actually something I’ve struggled with myself.
On the one hand, defining the physical doesn’t seem that hard. Physicists don’t seem to have much trouble knowing what to study. Physics is usually described as the study of matter and related concepts such as energy, forces, fields, and spacetime.
But it’s often pointed out that the earliest proponents of the materialistic philosophy argued that everything was just atoms and void, with our everyday experiences coming from the motions and interactions of those atoms. It was in the 1800s when the existence of the other concepts started to get fleshed out.
It could be argued that those concepts are just the details of accounting for the motions and interactions Democritus was originally talking about. But it feels like more than that, particularly since matter at the most fundamental level currently accessible, quantum fields, seems far less concrete than what Democritus and Epicurus had in mind.
This leads to Hempel’s dilemma (presented by Carl Hempel in 1969), which asks if physicalism is about what physics has currently established. If so, then since everyone understands that current physics is incomplete, physicalism is wrong. Or if physicalism is based on some hypothetical future physics that is complete, then it seems vacuous, since no one know what that ideal physics might be.
Hempel gets at a core fact about all scientific knowledge; that it’s provisional, subject to change on future evidence, something that seems inevitable given the problem of induction that David Hume identified. Although I don’t take Hempel’s dilemma as a defeater of physicalism, but more an insight that the ontology of the view isn’t static, but something that is always changing and shifting. In my view, it should be seen as a strength, not a weakness. Don’t we want our ontologies to update as we learn more?
But it does highlight that the definition is tricky. Daniel Stoljar, in the SEP article on physicalism, covers a number of other strategies in trying to define “physical.” An interesting one is the Via Negativa, which focuses on what the physical is not. The example given is that it’s not anything irreducibly mental.
I like this approach because it gets at the real heart of the matter. If there’s anything that could kill physicalism as an outlook, it would be irrefutable evidence of some aspect of the mental being fundamental. Although Stoljar points out that there are other concepts generally taken to be non-physical, such as the élan vital.
Another approach which resonates with me as a structural realist is to define the physical in terms of structure. My way of describing it is to say that the physical is whatever is part of the structure and regularities of the objective world. That seems to rule out putative platonic objects and non-physical phenomenal structures, but include everything we normally think of as physical. Although I’m sure someone could come up with a concept that would frustrate it.
The one that might be the closest to truth is the idea that physicalism is an attitudinal stance. Stoljar discusses a version of this as taking one’s ontology from what physical theories describe. This is a bit narrow and he points out the obvious issues with it. Among them that it still seems vulnerable to Hempel.
But a better more general one might be an attitude, an expectation, that for whatever phenomena we are faced with, there is, at least in principle, an understandable explanation, one in terms of structure and regularities (laws). We see this stance at work with dark energy and dark matter. There’s no discussion about whether these are supernatural or occult phenomena. They are approached with the expectation that some kind of mechanistic explanation is possible.
A physicalist just applies that attitude to everything. Even if faced with something that might initially seem non-physical, the attitude that there is an understandable explanation underneath will generally exist. This seems to make physicalism similar to methodological naturalism, although the scope is more than just standard scientific investigations.
(There are people who make distinctions between physicalism and naturalism. For instance, David Chalmers consider himself a naturalistic dualist, so he seems to see himself in the naturalist camp but not the physicalist one. However, given that the etymology of “physics” is the Greek word for nature, and the etymology of “nature” the Latin word for physics, it seems like any distinction would be pretty subtle.)
This attitudinal way of looking at it may get at what’s really going on with a lot of these various metaphysical views. Physicalism is the attitude of everything being understandable, while other views like panpsychism and idealism seem more poetic and artistic in nature, more about seeking connection in reality rather than trying to understand and manipulate it.
Which raises the interesting possibility that there may be value in learning to put on “the glasses” of other views, to see the world through each of their filters, even if only for particular purposes, maybe for no other reason than to ensure our metaphysical biases aren’t acting as blinders, cutting us off from other possibilities.
In the end, for me, predictive success remains the best arbiter of reality. But the path to that success often requires unconventional thinking.
What do you think? Am I overlooking some of physicalism’s problems? Or its strengths? Or being too ecumenical in my closing?
SelfAwarePatterns 
I like the topic but some of the discussion … not so much. Re “This leads to Hempel’s dilemma (presented by Carl Hempel in 1969), which asks if physicalism is about what physics has currently established. If so, then since everyone understands that current physics is incomplete, physicalism is wrong. Or if physicalism is based on some hypothetically future physics that is complete, then it seems vacuous, since no one know what that ideal physics might be.”
No physical theory is ever complete, nor can it be. This hasn’t been proven as it has for arithmetic systems, but I think it is obvious, so the claim that physicalism is incomplete is specious.
Re “But it feels like more than that, particularly since matter at the most fundamental levels currently accessible, quantum fields, seems far less concrete than what Democritus and Epicurus had in mind.”
So? The founders of a theory rarely, if ever, have complete knowledge. One of the characteristics of a high quality theory is that it allows for future discovers. So, “all matter is made of atoms,” does that hold up? Well, neutron stars are not, yada, yada, yada, but Democritus and Epicurus were talking about ordinary matter and that claim holds up quite nicely.
Some modern theories say that, in the line of “it’s turtles all the way down,” that the universe is infinite whether you go outward or inward. If that is so then we should expect more and more complexity to be revealed as time goes on, but … So, what? At various levels we lose contact with the finer points. Cam you feel single atoms or molecules colliding with your skin? No, too small. There are galaxies colliding with one another, should we worry? No, too far away.
Our existence is withing a small sphere and the rules we make up from observations within that small sphere only need apply there. But, of course, when we check if the rules hold far, far away, we are not shocked to find they do (mostly). This suggests some underlying structural supports for those behaviors and existences … and as scientists we use what we observe as guides, not absolute truths. Sometimes philosophers cannot seem to know the difference.
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There are people who see Hempel as a devastating problem for physicalism, so I felt like I needed to at least mention it. And it does knock off simple naive attempts at defining the view and drive us to look at what might be more fundamental to it.
Turtles all the way down seems like more of a metaphysical view than a scientific one. If reality is fundamentally continuous, as in general relativity, then it might be infinite all the way down. Although the Planck scale seems like a barrier. Brian Cox recently noted that to probe scales smaller than Planck takes so much energy you end up creating a black hole. Which seems to put up a barrier to us going smaller. Although who knows what future experimentalists might come up with.
Philosophers do seem preoccupied with ultimate existence. The thing is, if the most fundamental scientific theories of today don’t accord with your view of ultimate reality, you can always hold out for a more fundamental theory that will. That’s one of the problems with metaphysical theories of ultimate reality; they’re fundamentally untestable.
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Re “Brian Cox recently noted that to probe scales smaller than Planck takes so much energy you end up creating a black hole.”
Look at how much energy it took to examine the insides of nuclei–far too great for the people at the time … but … sounds like just another energy barrier and I am hesitant to accept calculations based upon general relativity when it breaks down so often.
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Good point.
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It sounds like you’re describing physicalism as reductionism, which is probably the most popular form, though apparently there are non reductive physicalists. I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked to anybody who identified as such, though it seems like such a view is implied in supervenience
—Physicalism is the attitude of everything being understandable, while other views like panpsychism and idealism seem more poetic and artistic in nature, more about seeking connection in reality rather than trying to understand and manipulate it.
Idealists and panpsychists aren’t generally interested in making up poetic mysteries, though I can see why you might think that from reading my posts.
I’m curious why you think believing reality consists in the enduring structures of scientific theories is not mathematical Platonism. Aren’t these structures things like the standard model (ie equations, math?) Or were you thinking of something else?
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It is reductionist. Can’t say I know a whole lot about non-reductive physicalist views. I do know about Chalmers’ type-B materialism, but that’s just an argument that the reduction can only be a posteriori rather than a priori. Outright non-reductive physicalism seems like it would be a strange beast. But I do know they exist.
On idealism and panpsychism, that’s what I get for trying to describe views I don’t hold. How would you characterize the idealist attitude? Or do you think that’s not a valid way of looking at it?
From what I’ve read of mathematical platonism, it’s the view that abstract objects exist outside of space and time with no spatiotemporal extent or with no causal effects. I currently lean non-factualist about whether those exist. For physicalism, it seems like we’re talking about structures that are part of the world and do have causal efficacy. Am I overlooking something that makes the views more alike than I’m thinking?
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Maybe that phrase “non-reductive physicalism” is unpopular? Apparently some functionalist views are considered “non-reductive physicalist”, but it gets complicated. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people out there who actually do believe in some form of non-reductive physicalism without realizing it. It does seem to be an uncommon label, at least lately.
As for idealism/panpsychism…these are hard to characterize as a group. Maybe mind is fundamental or primary.
I guess I assumed ontic structural realists would have to be mathematical platonists. What sort of structures survive theory changes and also have causal efficacy? Can you give me an example?
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Hadn’t heard that before for functionalism. Most of the stuff I’ve read has it firmly within the reductive physicalist framework. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has that take.
On idealism/panpsychism, right, I wouldn’t ask you to do it for panpsychism since that’s not your view. And mind is primary certainly matches my understanding of idealism. Thanks. I guess I’m asking how you see it changing the way you view or interact with the world. Or does it?
“What sort of structures survive theory changes and also have causal efficacy? Can you give me an example?”
The best examples might be Newton’s structures. You can see it in the equations between his theory of gravitation and general relativity; all his variables are present plus more for high velocity and high energy situations. The same is true for classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, particularly if you look at the Hamilton-Jacobi equation and compare it to Schrὅndinger’s. (Sorry, I don’t have the LaTex skills to show them here.)
But even Ptolemy’s geocentric structures can reportedly be seen as preserved in Copernicus’. They just have a much smaller scope of usefulness. It’s the interpretation, the story, that is radically different.
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Sorry it took so long to reply. My husband had a heart attack and I got covid just before he was released from the hospital. Great timing.
—Hadn’t heard that before for functionalism. Most of the stuff I’ve read has it firmly within the reductive physicalist framework. But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone has that take.
Yeah, I think that’s because most functionalists are reductive physicalists (at least that’s my impression too). Although when you think about functionalism as such, reductionism isn’t necessarily implied. I’m not sure physicalism is even implied, considering Aristotle might be thought of as a functionalist or precursor to functionalism.
—On idealism/panpsychism, right, I wouldn’t ask you to do it for panpsychism since that’s not your view.
Depends on what you mean by those terms, of course. In contemporary terms, I think people think of Kastrup’s “analytic idealism” when they think of idealism, and I’m not sure that would be a great label for what I think (I still haven’t read him). I prefer teleological cosmopsychism and certain kinds of panexperientialism rather than “reductive” or constitutive panpsychism.
As for whether it changes how I view the world, sure it does! I talk about that in my posts all the time. Here’s one I know you’ve read, but I’ll leave it for anyone who’s interested.
https://open.substack.com/pub/philosophyandfiction/p/what-the-demiurge-has-to-say-about?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thanks for the explanation.
—Sorry, I don’t have the LaTex skills to show them here.
Ha! I don’t even know what LaTex skills are!
It sounds like you’re taking what’s preserved in the mathematical models to be causally efficacious? Is this in a paradigmatic sense?
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Really sorry to hear that Tina. You just don’t seem to be catching any breaks lately. Hope both of you are able to fully recover. No worries at all on delays. Totally as you have time, interest, and energy.
Functionalism certainly isn’t tied to physicalism. You could have a functional account that was also dualist, panpsychist, or idealist. The only thing it’s really incompatible with, at least in its pure form, is epiphenomenalism.
Kastrup is an easy example to cite for idealism because he’s so prevalent. But I’m very aware there are plenty of more thoughtful takes around, like that guy in the video you shared with me a while back.
Teleological cosmopsychism? I’m familiar with cosmopsychism, but not the teleological variety. But I can see the similarities with what you’ve described from Berkeley’s subjective idealism.
I need to revisit your post with my current question in mind. Thanks!
“It sounds like you’re taking what’s preserved in the mathematical models to be causally efficacious? Is this in a paradigmatic sense?”
I think the mathematical models describe relationships, including causal ones. Although the relationships described are usually symmetrical, and cause and effect are asymmetrical. With the second law of thermodynamics, that asymmetry ends up emerging in complex systems. So causes per se aren’t in the equations, but relations are that the second law then turns into causes and effects. Hope that makes sense.
Not sure what you’re asking about it being in a paradigmatic sense, but maybe the above ends up addressing it?
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—Teleological cosmopsychism? I’m familiar with cosmopsychism, but not the teleological variety. But I can see the similarities with what you’ve described from Berkeley’s subjective idealism.
You know how I feel about ‘isms’. I’m just trying to go with the flow and come up with some ism that describes my views. One thing I’d point out is that I think most people misinterpret Berkeley, even idealists. Especially idealists. (By “most people” I’m including Kant! Even Whitehead waffles when it comes to B., though I think he understood him in the end.) B’s so-called “subjective idealism” was never intended to be “subjective” at all. They think his views lead to solipsism, so they call him a subjective idealist without seriously engaging with his arguments. I heard Kastrup characterizing B this way, which made me not especially eager to consider Kastrup an expert in idealism. But even David Bentley Hart got him wrong, and he should know better. It has become so commonplace to use him as a whipping boy that hardly anyone, even in academia, will bother to correct a mischaracterization of him, even if it can be easily proven wrong. The same is true of Descartes too. Of course, I could be wrong. But I’d be happy to discuss that with anyone who has bothered to read Berkeley!
—So causes per se aren’t in the equations, but relations are that the second law then turns into causes and effects. Hope that makes sense. Not sure what you’re asking about it being in a paradigmatic sense, but maybe the above ends up addressing it?
I’m not sure I get it. Anyway, never mind what I said about paradigms since I don’t think that’s what you meant. So these equations, models, and laws aren’t causally efficacious, but describe something else that is? I thought you were an ontic structural realist, which I was trying to square with not being a mathematical Platonist. Or am I misremembering?
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I’ve often wondered why Berkeley’s outlook was called subjective idealism since it sounds like he thought there is an external world, just one in the mind of God. Wikipedia’s (non-citation supported) reason is:
But I have to admit I haven’t read him, just quick summaries.
“So these equations, models, and laws aren’t causally efficacious, but describe something else that is?”
Yes. They describe relations, and causes are relations. But the description itself isn’t causal.
“I thought you were an ontic structural realist, which I was trying to square with not being a mathematical Platonist.”
Hmmm. Let me try it like this. There is the mathematical description and there is the referent of that description. To the degree of the empirical success of the description, the referent is real in the world. That, to me, is ontic structural realism. Mathematical Platonism, as I understand it, asserts that all mathematical descriptions reference something real, even if there’s no evidence the referent is in the world.
The difference is the scope of what is committed to as being real. (Although I’m sure there are OSRists out there who are also Mathematical Platonists.)
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“An interesting one is the Via Negativa, which focuses on what the physical is not. The example given is that it’s not anything irreducibly mental”.
Wouldn’t that mean also that whatever is “mental” is not “physical” and thus beyond the bounds of physicalism?
A comprehensive theory should explain both, so your attitude of looking for an understandable explanation makes sense.
I’m still not a fan of IIT but I think that likely that mind and consciousness are tied to information. Consciousness is a form of biological information in the brain that emerges from the secondary order of the brain’s chaotic processes. Information itself has a dual nature just as we perceive body/brain and mind to have. It exists in the order of something physical but stands also apart from the physical realization.
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“Wouldn’t that mean also that whatever is “mental” is not “physical” and thus beyond the bounds of physicalism?”
It would, if it was irreducible to physics. I think at that point we could say that physicalism was in trouble, at least in its most common forms.
I’m with you on information. And I don’t think IIT has a monopoly on information. It seems like a central part of every cognitive theory of consciousness. (And of cognition for that matter.)
Although I wonder if you have something like Chalmers’ double aspect theory of information in mind.
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Actually I really like that Chalmers quote.
Basically I agree with it, but I would like more bridging of the gap between physical and phenomenal.
At this point, I am thinking consciousness is secondary emergent order that expresses in vertexes, travelling waves, and possibly other geometric patterns in brain firing patterns. The patterns can feed back into themselves expanding and morph into new patterns. These morphing patterns are the raw material of consciousness that are brought together in extra dimensions (of undetermined sort, possibly information based) that can aggregate patterns from different parts of the brain and from different times the near present and past.
In this scenario, consciousness is like the messages contained in the brain patterns. Or, another way, the patterns are the physical substrate of the message. Understand by “message,” I am not implying a homunculus that needs to exist to understand it. We understand the patterns possibly simply because we are feeling our own neurons firing.
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“but I would like more bridging of the gap between physical and phenomenal.”
Me too. That’s the thing with Chalmers. He doesn’t see the gap as bridgeable, leading to his property dualism. He takes the dual aspect nature as something fundamental.
The wave patterns have always struck me as too high level to be the stuff of consciousness or cognition. I tend to think it’s much harder than that, in the actual level of circuits firing. But maybe the evidence will prove me wrong.
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The problem is we don’t really have a grammar for the patterns.
Take the examples of motion processing and place/ grid cells.
Experiments show that when viewing moving images or natural movies, waves propagate to match stimulus motion in a way that anticipates or predicts the future location of the object before the stimulus reaches the cortex in that location. Vortex locations often correspond to task-relevant zones, perception onset, and functional hubs where integration or decision-making occurs. Similar vortex patterns appear transiently during visual recognition, insight moments, and semantic tasks.
In vertebrates, the primary structure for spatial and episodic memory is the hippocampus with place cells and the entorhinal cortex (adjacent to the hippocampus) with grid cells. Place cells activate when the animal is in a specific location. They are context-sensitive and may respond differently in different environments. Grid cells activate in a regular, hexagonal lattice as the animal moves through space. The hexagonal patterns are maintained even in the dark and measure distance and direction. Together place and grid cells form a map and metric of space.
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To add one thing.
It is common to think of consciousness as information comprising representations of objects in the internal (to the organism) and external worlds. This isn’t my argument. Consciousness is one level removed from that view. It contains representations of neural firing patterns that result from the nervous systems reactions to the internal and external worlds. It is biological information first and only indirectly information about the world.
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That has some resonance with higher order theories, although I suspect that’s not what you’re talking about. Sounds like you’re more along the lines of the EM field thing. Maybe the data will swing that way. We’ll have to see.
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Not EM field at all, although I think that could be involved somewhere in the overall processing. This actually does away with the need for a physical medium for consciousness itself.
The dual nature of all information – even a telegram – means it requires a physical realization while the message itself is abstract and non-physical. So, if consciousness is biological information, it would require a brain to process it, but consciousness itself would be abstract , non-physical, or mental.
I can understand why Chalmers never thought the gap was bridgeable. If it was, it would solve the “hard” problem on which a lot of his reputation is based, don’t you think?
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Chalmer is indeed most famous for coining the hard problem. Although to his credit, he hasn’t rested on those laurels. He also coined the meta-problem, which is why we think there’s a hard problem, admitting it does have the potential to dissolve the hard problem. And his non-physicalism is so thin it’s barely there. Unlike most non-physicalists, he has no issue with machine consciousness, at least in principle.
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I’m with you both on the role of information, but I see the “bridging of the gap between physical and phenomenal” as fairly straightforward. If consciousness is about pattern recognition [ahem], an information process, it necessarily has a 1st person, informational, perspective. That perspective can point to patterns without knowing about the physical events that generated the response to those patterns.
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Just to be clear – I didn’t say anything about “recognition” because that starts to get into the homunculus problem. What is doing the “recognizing?”
I’m saying the information in the pattern is consciousness and that is why it can’t actually be found physically in the brain. Only the pattern can be found.
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on “what is doing the recognizing?”, the answer is not so much homunculus but single-minded homunculi. At the top human level, they’re called (by Ruth Millikan) unitrackers. At the fundamental (simple) level I’ve recently taken to calling them ptrackers. But consciousness is about the process. Patterns, information, etc. are parts and/or explained by the process.
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From the perspective of my Cognitive Behavioural mindset, this looks like a problem emerging from human psychology, rooted in our limited sensorium. But, I’m not a physiciist.
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Could be. The dividing line between our psychology and the world seems like it can always be a tricky thing. Which is why I always fall back to depending the predictability of a theory. However we think of the boundary, it seems like the theory either increases the accuracy of predicting future conscious experiences, or it doesn’t.
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Nice essay Mike. This may not be germane to the points you are making but sometimes I think we sometimes dwell a little too much on labels. Labels are a little like maps—they are not the territory but help describe the territory. A highway map, if it’s done right, tells the truth and a weather map can also tell the truth from another perspective. But neither describes the territory from (as Hilary Putnam puts it) God’s eye point of view. I’m happy with the idea that we live in one world—and we seek to understand the truth about it from various perspectives. I think the ancient philosopher, Xenophanes got it right: “
“Truly the gods have not from the beginning revealed all things to mortals, but by long seeking, mortals discover what is better. As for certain truth, no man has known it, Nor will he know it. Even if a man should chance to speak the most complete truth, yet he himself would not know it. All is a woven web of guesses.”
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Thanks Matti. I definitely agree with that quote for metaphysical beliefs.
The labels often put people in different camps. And often the exchanges between those camps end up looking like butter-side-up vs butter-side-down type clashes. Jacy Reese Anthis called it “intuition jousting,” where people are just yelling at each other from different intuitive beliefs.
It can all be in fun as long as we don’t take it too seriously. But too many seem unable to resist getting carried away.
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Regarding prediction as an arbiter of the right account, I am thinking that alternative levels of description can have more predictive power (accuracy relative to data that needs to be gathered to make the prediction). Further, the imperfect mapping between levels of description merits closer study, as it accounts for this difference in predictive power.
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Different levels can certainly be easier or harder to work with for particular purposes. And definitely the mapping between levels often doesn’t exist yet, particularly in the brain. Neuroscience seems in no danger of running out of things to do anytime soon!
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I like how Alan Watts approaches this problem. He says that in Western culture, there is a tendency to view nature as something dead, separate from humans, devoid of consciousness, feelings, or morality. Even in religions, people believe that there must be something external to nature that “breathes life” into these dead things (dust, clay, atoms, whatever). Watts rightfully observes that monotheistic religions reflect the structure of human society with a king ruling over everything rather than how nature works. Atheistic worldviews developed because of scientific progress but also because of the need for political liberation of the individual from the despotic rule of kings and masters. Who likes the idea of being watched and judged for every step and every word? But western atheism has the same problem – it views nature as something external and hostile to humans which needs to be conquered and beaten into submission, maybe even more so than religion. And that worldview is the reason why people tend to destroy their environment causing technogenic disasters.
Watts proposes to view ourselves as a part of the universe. The word “physical universe” doesn’t even make sense. Universe is one. Everything physical or non-physical is a part of it. Watts argues that everything that exists is a manifestation of the universe. Apples come from apple tree, and apple trees grow from apples. Therefore, an apple contains everything needed to grow an apple tree and vice versa. Same with humans and the universe. Conscious and moral humans cannot come from universe devoid of consciousness and morality. Consciousness and morality, therefore, must be properties of the universe, just like the shape, size, and taste of the apples are properties of the apple tree. Watts says that humans are like waves on the surface of the ocean. They are distinct, they are born and they die, they move, they have properties and behavior, but they are not separate from the ocean. They are manifestations of the ocean. And everything that humans have like consciousness and morality must be a property of the universe.
Watts is not original with these ideas. I think he summarizes them from various religions and cultures. What do you think of this approach?
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I agree with him that we are part of, integrated with, and dependent on Nature, not something separate from it. And there probably are benefits to keeping that in mind. Although just having foresight seems like it would also help us avoid destroying our environment. The problem is people seem to think the consequences are too far in the future for them to worry about. And perceived self interest (conscious or not) seems to drive a lot of stances.
“Conscious and moral humans cannot come from universe devoid of consciousness and morality.”
For this part, I think we have to remember the second law of thermodynamics, which leads to ever higher complexity in the world, and evolution by natural selection. When we do, we have a narrative for how (at least functional) consciousness emerges and human morality.
I supposed we could argue that these things were latent in the initial conditions of the universe, but given that in all but an infinitesimal portion of the universe these things did not emerge, it feels like a stretch. But maybe I’m overlooking something?
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This topic is more about points of view and attitudes than facts. Watts made a funny analogy to think about. He said that conscious behavior is nothing more than a complex response to external stimuli. If you kick a rock, it goes “clunk”. It’s the rock’s response to being kicked. If you kick a person, the response might be more complex. But it’s still just a response to a stimulus. 🙂 The difference is in the level of complexity and organization.
It’s also interesting that back in 1960 Watts believed that intelligence is not exclusive to humans and exists independently from humans. That was the era when telecommunications (radio and television) rapidly developed. Watts observed that connections between humans are much like connections between neurons in a brain. That’s what intelligence is – the ability to create complex connections. And it can be found everywhere in nature. He believed that telecommunication is the future, so most of his ideas were transmitted in the form of radio broadcasts rather than books. It’s interesting that these observations were made more than 60 years before artificial intelligence became real. He was a great visionary.
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Peter Hankins, who used to run a blog on consciousness, once quipped that he could decide whether or not something was conscious by how it responded to being poked with a stick.
Watts does sound like he had a lot of ideas early for his time.
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This reminds me of something:Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and physicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists – unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know – are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.
We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it – that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness.
–Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State
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This is a good point. Often immaterialists seriously underestimate matter as revealed by science.
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Interesting quote. This is the point Watts was making when he referred to the pitfalls of the western tendency to split the world view into ugly, dead, chaotic matter and beautiful, live, and organized immaterial “God” or whatchamacallit. There is no such separation. These ideas are two sides of the same reality.
The historical context of this quote is also characteristic. 19th century was the era when societies were getting rid of oppressive authoritarian political systems – monarchies, institutes of slavery in the U.S., serfdom in Russia, etc. This necessarily lead to rejection of all kinds of authorities, including the God’s ultimate authority. This was a topic of intense discussion in society, when Dostoyevsky wrote “Brothers Karamazov” with the famous “If there is no God, then everything is permissible”. And this discussion is very much alive today, in the ideological clashes between religion and atheists, and in political clashes between modern anti-state, anti-corporate anarchists and conservative authoritarians who advocate for “law and order”.
It’s also interesting that materialistic worldview as implemented by Marxists in communist Russia with the so called “power of the people” quickly lead to even worse oppression and authoritarianism. Marx’s theory was that “productive forces define economic relations”, that material conditions define how people think about the world, “being defines consciousness”. It quickly turned into “beating defines consciousness” as this teaching was mocked in the Soviet Union.
In my opinion, both idealism and materialism are flawed. I like Watts’s holistic worldview much better.
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Ask yourself this: over the millennia of philosophy and science, have ANY of the those proposing non-physical explanations ever produced a single piece of evidence or solid reasoning to support their claims that have been anything like as convincing as the physical explanation? There have been ZERO regular laws of predictability produced by any of their claimants.
Dualism? Why only DUAL explantions? Dualists don’t deny the physical, because the evidence is overwhelming. They add the mental (as mind or soul) only because they as humans have a personal mental perspective, which has never had its physical cause refuted. Their projection to panpsychism or gods is such a massive leap that it makes the as yet unexplained physics of mind look like solid science.
Where are the Tri-isms, the Qud-isms. It’s not that they don’t exist. Their problem, when you look at them, are no more that spliting dualism into more components … doing little more than the distinction between physics, chemistry, biology .. which are physics from convenient perspectives.
Sanders Peirce (3: Firstness, etc), Popper (3: Three Worlds), Vedanta (3: Levels), Plato (4: Divided line), Wilber (4: Quadrants), Aristotle (4: Causes) … variations on dualism.
There is nothing genuinely beyond dualism, and dualism survives only because we have as yet no laws, even probabilistic ones, that predict the emergence of mental experience.
By the way, there is no problem of induction. Induction is exactly what one should expect to be available to finite entities investigating themselves, let alone a massive universe (it being a finite or infinite universe is almost irrelevantly speculative … the marvel being that we have discovered so much). The problem lies with deduction, where infinite regress on proving premisis is the real problem that makes deductive proof impossible.
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No argument from me on there being no evidence for anything non-physical. And dualism seems to be a species wide intuition, one that’s hard to shake. Even hardcore materialists can fall into dualistic thinking unless they keep their guard up. The problem is most don’t even realize they’re doing it.
For induction, inferring general principles from specific cases, I think the problem is real, but we’ve just learned to live with it. The problem is we just don’t know the scope of the inferred principle / rule / law. So when we use it deductively, predicting specific outcomes from the general principle, it works as long as the future case is sufficiently similar to previous cases. But at some point, just about every principle eventually fails.
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I think inductive inference is a feature, not a problem or a bug. It is adaptive. You have an inductively derive rule .. it works … until exceptions are found … we adjust the inference, or accept it as close enough. The error would be the take an inductive inference as absolutely true … and the ‘problem’ would lie with that abuse of it, not the correct use. Induction gets us out of the stiffling bind of extreme skepticism.
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“Physicalism is the attitude of everything being understandable, while other views like panpsychism and idealism seem more poetic and artistic in nature, more about seeking connection in reality rather than trying to understand and manipulate it.”
Obviously I welcome the suggestion that “there may be value in learning to put on ‘the glasses’ of other views.” But I’d quibble with the idea that other views are not about understanding. I think they are attempts to understand; but they may be less about manipulation of things that are reliably predictable, and more about co-operation with things that aren’t.
I think you’re onto something when you associate physicalism with predictive success. Physicalism might be defined as the belief, or approach, or attitude if you prefer, that whatever is reliably predictable counts as real, while anything that is not thoroughly repeatable is less real, and can be traced to things that are. The coming to be and passing away of things exposes their unreality; what is real persists in a timeless way.
This view has progressed from the classical Greek search for the persistent elements that make up the world of appearance — earth, air, fire, and water, little triangles and squares — through the Galilean emphasis on stable quantities in preference to evanescent qualities; the Newtonian appeal to predictable masses and forces in space and time; and on to the statistical certainties of quantum mechanics. At each turn, the ontology of “the physical” has been expanded or adjusted, but what holds everything within the category is a reliable, predictable, unchanging nature.
Nature so conceived lends itself to mechanical interpretation, and to mechanical exploitation. But a subtler conception is available. We can allow for predictability within the bewildering frame of co-operation, which hints at a slight (but not hopeless) unpredictability in one’s partners. It grants them some agency. To the physicalist it is bewildering, because the reliably predictable just behaves; it does not engage in a dance with us. And this is where other conceptions maybe get a little more poetic.
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Good to hear I wasn’t too far off the mark in describing the attitude of panpsychism. Thanks.
I would just note that I don’t think physicalism would decide that something currently unpredictable isn’t real, just that there is some pattern, some structure, some regularities to it that we just haven’t discovered yet. And, of course, it’s understood that some things are only predictable probabilistically. A determinist, which is not all physicalists, would assume there’s some underlying explanation for the limitation, even if it can never be overcome.
Maybe another way of expressing it, which I think would fit with your discussion, is that physicalism is looking at the universe with an engineer’s eye, as you note, looking for how it can be predicted and manipulated. In that sense, it’s notable that a lot of the early modern scientists (like Galileo) were both natural philosophers and engineers.
Whereas the other views are looking at it with a different eye, maybe looking more for harmony and inspiration rather than control.
(Just a note about using HTML tags in these comments. I’m not sure how you’re entering them, but WordPress lately has been displaying the tags. I’ve fixed the last couple, but it makes me nervous to update people’s comments without letting them know. Let me know if I goofed anything. It doesn’t look like the new comment editor has an HTML mode. Looks like we have to use the built-in controls now.)
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I’ve learned that panpsychism comes in many forms, and I can’t speak for all of them. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe some of them as physicalist. As for me, I’m not sure yet whether I might be an idealist.
Of course physicalists allow for currently unpredictable things, but they would insist that if such phenomena are real, they can be traced to other things which are predictable. Anything that could so be traced would be welcomed into the physicalist fold as “physical,” at least in a second-order way, and anything that could not would be put down to illusion, delusion, faulty reasoning, or some other category of the unreal.
The physicalist attitude is indeed affiliated with engineering, and also with what we’ve come to think of as science. But it’s worth reflecting that some early engineers, such as Leonardo da Vinci, were also artists, and that a good part of early engineering involved deploying mathematical proportions such as the “golden mean” that were believed to have cosmic resonances beyond mere utility. Many physicalists profess a deep sense of awe and wonder, but they don’t let it affect their calculations. Those who do, the ones who protest “ugly physics,” seem to be acknowledging something beyond the merely physical.
There are three ways of posting comments in WordPress: through the original post in all its template-formatted glory; through the bare-bones Reader presentation of the post; and through either the Conversations facility available in the Reader (if the comment is for another site) or the Comments facility available in the Dashboard (if the comment is for one’s own site). I get the impression that HTML markup is not handled consistently across these methods, but I haven’t made a study of it. For all I know, Markdown markup is also accepted in all three, and with the same proviso. I’ve been using text-editor HTML (or some form of XML) markup for so long now that it’s second nature; I barely notice myself doing it. Thanks for fixing it when it goes wrong. My own approach with comments is to correct anything that the writer clearly would have corrected themselves, given the opportunity.
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Panpsychism seems to have a lot of resonance with neutral monist views. But I’ve definitely heard of variations which seem to blend into idealism; I’m thinking of the cosmopsychist varieties which seem similar to the subjective idealist idea of the external world being in the mind of God or a universal consciousness.
Right. One of the things a typical physicalist will require to consider something to be real is that any experience of it be repeatable, reproducible, or otherwise verifiable. But it doesn’t always have to be repeatable. Physicalists, for instance, have no trouble accepting supernovae, even thought their appearance is most definitely not predictable or repeatable, although it can usually be verified from many observers. And a lot of work has been done to understand the mechanisms behind them.
WordPress also lets you reply using the toolbar at the top and by email. And definitely they’re not all consistent. I got a customer satisfaction survey from them a few months ago, and the commenting system was my biggest complaint. I pointed out that Substack was leaving them in the dust in that department. Hopefully they’ll do something about it.
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A particular supernova can’t be predicted or repeated, but the phenomena are considered predictable in principle, and repeatable in the sense that others can happen in the normal course of events. If only one of them had ever happened and it violated our understanding of physics, it would be classed as a miracle. But for physicalism there are no miracles, so either a predictable and repeatable explanation would be sought, or the phenomenon would be denied or dismissed as unsuitable for serious consideration.
This could be an issue for the so-called “significant coincidences” of Jungian synchronicity. They are truly not repeatable or predictable, and therefore according to physicalism they cannot be real, whatever those who claim to experience them may believe. Instead they are put down to truly random coincidences, misunderstood through cognitive biases. The same reluctance was even an issue in accepting the meteor impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. A “one-off” theory of their disappearance, invoking a random catastrophe, was not considered a scientifically respectable type of explanation in principle. Eventually the physical evidence of this unique event outweighed the systematic (or systemic) prejudice against the unpredictable.
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Right. When it comes to miracles, there are always a few possibilities. One is just a very improbable event. Improbable is not impossible, and improbable events do happen all the time. Another is that something outside the laws of physics took place, at least physics as currently understood. That possibility has to be balanced against the far less unlikely possibility that reports of the event are mistaken or fraudulent.
All of which is why scientific evidence is usually required to be repeatable, reproducible, or verifiable in some manner. It’s just too easy for individuals to be mistaken about one-time events. Even trained scientists can fall victim. Not all failed attempts at replication necessarily indicate an issue; sometimes its a methodology issue. (Although if the effect is too sensitive to precise methodology, that may say something about the effect.)
There is a difference between having low credence in a theory and not considering it scientific. (Not that some people aren’t prone to getting carried away in their rhetoric.) There was resistance to the impact theory, mostly because it seemed too simple and easy. But evidence always wins. Even today, there remain alternate theories, like massive volcanism. Although it seems plausible that the volcanism of the time was exacerbated by the impact.
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There is nothing mystic in the mind of man.
There was a substack on “Bursting the AI bubble” – Dave Silva, where he calls out how current AI is not a mind. No shit. Paraphrasing: It’s [AI] not mysterious, there’s no inner mind, it’s not magic.
Silva is seemingly stuck thinking the human mind exceeds its physical boundaries. Your supposition that the mind is knowable, in every way, to me points to realizing that the current manifestation of AI represents only the most fundamental equivalent of the mind–the raw processing, albeit, done in silicon vs carbon.
AI LLMs represent a version of the lowest layer of a mind. There’s a whole stack of functionality yet to be built that simulates the human mind’s sensory inputs, endocrine influences, pain and pleasure reward systems, long term, episodic and short term memory, and prolly a dozen more brain features that can be documented, designed and deployed as technology.
You seem bent on continuously beating this consciousness horse–if so, intentionally pushing the discussion into the AI realm feels… useful.
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I’m actually somewhat burnt out on consciousness as a topic. A big part of it is the word “consciousness” so underdetermines what people are talking about, with so many disparate things conflated together, that it makes most of the debates sterile, people yelling past each other with different definitions.
With AI in particular, my stance is that AI will be conscious when it’s able to consistently and reliably convince the majority of us that it is. When that happens, you’ll start seeing laws about it. Until then, most of the discussion feels like it’s of limited value. I’m more interested in what cognitive capabilities it does have. For those, I think LLMs are just chasing the wrong problems so far. Although some of the techniques should be useful for systems that will chase the right ones.
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The day that AI convinces people it’s conscious may come sooner than you think. In fact it may have already arrived, and the inevitable is being postponed only by experts who insist otherwise. Are you aware of the widespread grieving sparked by the discontinuation of ChatGPT 4o, or the deeply convincing behaviour that has brought it on?
(Incidentally, I’m testing the HTML markup in the WordPress Conversations facility.)
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You might be right. I did hear something about the grieving. Although there has always been a vocal minority eager to see intentionality in these systems.
Looks like the HTML worked that way. I’m trying it by email to see if it works this way.
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To your point: https://archive.md/D4EYW
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I think your overview of the problems defining “physicalism” is (further) evidence for the recommendation that definitions should come late in inquiry. Only after investigating dolphins closely are we in a good position to define “dolphin”. Otherwise we risk defining them as a type of fish. For this reason, your focus on the attitude driving “physicalism” is probably a helpful move.
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I think we can have initial definitions. In the case of dolphins, they could have been defined just based on their shape and behavior, including the need to surface and use their blowhole, which would have been a clue that they weren’t like many of the other creatures in the seas and rivers.
But the trick is to stay loose with those definitions. And realize they will change as we learn new things. And some old definitions may go away.
It’s when we can’t even come up with a non-controversial placeholder that I start to suspect there’s a problem with the concept.
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I would rather have a family of placeholders, all tentative. It’s natural and predictable that people will argue about the relative importance of the placeholders (or even whether X should be on the list, or Y, or both…) in the early days.
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Right, but if we have a family of placeholders, we may well have a family of distinct concepts. And how long do “the early days” get to last? We still struggle to define God, life, consciousness, religion, and many other concepts, despite investigating and debating them for centuries or millenia.
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And we often DO have a family of distinct concepts. I’m not a historian of science or language, but I’m pretty sure heat and temperature were split from an older single term. Another reason to deploy the family resemblance approach until the science is clarified.
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As a philosophy, physicalism is relatively benign. What makes it toxic is the attitude that tags along, effectively undermining its innocence. And what is that attitude?
Physicalism was born out of rebellion against religious authority and stands in stark opposition to the metaphysical position of idealism. Unfortunately, much if not all of its philosophical arguments are designed to refute idealism, making physicalism an ideology.
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Physicalism is definitely a metaphysical ideology, albeit something of a minimalist one. It takes the ontology implied by science and denies the additional aspects proposed by other ideologies. There’s no question that there are real things the current ontology is missing, and that it will have to be amended in the future. The question is whether future additions will look anything like the additional propositions in the other outlooks.
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